I’m still thinking about Cambodia. When there, when I wasn’t reading faces, or reading between the lines of the socio-economic polka of carefree tourists and often profoundly poor locals, or skimming for the wisdom in ancient piles of stone such as Angkor Wat, I read Carol Livingston’s 1997 memoir of Cambodia. Gecko Tails sounds like a children’s book; at first I thought it must be Livingston making punning reference to the stories she heard in a Phnom Penh ex-pat bar, the Gecko. But this benign little lizard, climbing walls wherever one travels in southeast Asia, has the ability to grow a new tail after sacrificing the old one to predators. This must be symbolic of Livingston’s hope for the country. (It’s still a weak title.) The book recounts her earlier tours of love and duty, and it’s pretty average¹, though the subject is strikingly unaverage: the latter days of the bitter Cambodian civil war. It’s nearly 20 years old now, but I still found it useful in fleshing out my dim and youthful impressions of killing fields and other by-products of the bloody Vietnam War. As an introduction to Cambodia that goes beyond beaches, cheap travel and temple tourism, it works well.
According to an impeccable source — some guy on Twitter who sounded like he knew what he was talking about — NCAA teams with Canadian ballplayers went 14-2 in the opening round of the men’s basketball national Tournament. (Yup, I refuse to recognize the play-in games as a “round”.) And since that was among my key variables for making my not-always-random choices for my bloody-but-unbowed bracket, I’d be doing even better than I have if only I’d had a better grasp/memory of who and where the Canucksters played.
Here’s a collection of quick and distant observations from a Canadian coach in exile in China, with not enough time and nowhere near the Internet fuel to watch more than highlight packages. I does me best, b’ys, but here follow my goofs, brain-cramps, gee whizzes, thinking with my flagpole, random basketball insights and profound apologies, in no special order. This shouldn’t take long.
Happy Spring, lovers of green and newness and absurd levels of attention to American college sports! That’s me, and maybe you, too.) My mind has been mainly not thinking much about Madness south of the border – or way way west of the West Regional, in Dalian, China – what with jobs and obligations of spirit and a sweet little community that thinks March is a heavenuva good time to celebrate New Year’s. (Happy to you!) The Thursday night games of the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament are all in the books, and I accidentally know a couple of results. I also know that I (again) won’t likely be able to watch anything on-line. But I’m in.
The True North, deep and talented.
My bracket is done. (Like yours, it’s likely already wrecked, but I’m not sure yet.) It’s an impulsive, ill-informed, laundry-biased, ancient-loyalty-skewed and tremendously Canuck-friendly set of predictions. I’ll spare you the details, but I do have a shocking winner, a fair slew of upsets, and a quality of analysis you’ll not likely see anywhere else. So let’s get right to it!
In round one, I have mild upsets: Stanford (10) gets through because its players really are students who play great ball (in many sports), and I know nothing about New Mexico except for gorgeous sunsets and the Navajo.
Joy? Outrage? Crucifixion? Palm branches?
And why is he so happy? (Is this happiness or madness?) Why do the people around him love him so much? (They do not know him, not really, but what they do know is good enough, thanks, and shut up, a–hole!)
Let’s say you don’t know who he is. Okay. Where is he? Who are these people? Why the outrageous joy? (Or is it Madness™? See, now I’m giving things away.) It’s a delirious Prodigal-Son-style homecoming, but they’ve never met the guy.
Does he look like a guide for the impressionable young? Did you think, Aha, no doubt! This man is an educator. (Did you really think that?) Well, he is. If the NCAA is full of “student-athletes” – and it is – then this is a teacher-mentor-rabbi-leader-cheerleader-huckster-salesman. He is a college basketball coach, and he is really good at what he does.
His name is Bruce Pearl.
What is he doing?
Bernard-Henri Levy is celebrated, so I understand, in his native France as a “public intellectual”, as if this was a good thing. It seems their culture tends toward approval of such a beast, which is likely one of the reasons many Americans are suspicious or
“Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful. And tall. And I see the sunrise before you do.”
dismissive of the French, even before they opposed G.W. Bush’s designs on Iraq. (Remember that? “Freedom fries” were being served at burger joints, because nothing French was palatable to a vociferous portion of American society.) Canadians are also leery of the so-called ivory tower; many think that intellectuals – “smarty pantses” – live nowhere else but white and high and mighty impractical.
Our John Ralston Saul is, therefore, a curious case. He’s not short of praise from various corners of the world: The Unconscious Civilization won Canada’s Governor General’s Award (prior, it must be noted, to his wife Adrienne Clarkson’s mandate), among many honours for his non-fiction and his novels; he’s been the President of International PEN (writers in global advocacy of reading, writing, and freedom of expression) since 2009; he’s a Chevalier of the French Academy of Arts and Letters and has received honorary doctorates around the world; he’s been acclaimed among the “visionaries” of the world by Utne Reader, and a “prophet” by Time magazine. Now, he’ll never make the cover of People, but he’s a Certifiably Celebrated Dude in some pretty lofty circles. But a Canadian? A public intellectual? Surely that sort of thing should be done only in private!
“Perhaps the ultimate truth about weight gain in western cultures – certainly in the U.S. – is that obese people are simply much, much better for the economy than thin people. They eat more food and, in so doing, drive up the need for agriculture, food processing, packaging and advertising. They get sicker more often and keep the medical system busier. They rely more on their vehicles, which is great for big oil. In fact, there is not one single aspect of capitalism that is not enhanced, on the dollar level, by obesity. Obesity…represents the end state of a certain way of viewing and experiencing the world.”
Douglas Coupland (1961- ) is a Canadian writer, best known for the first of his dozen novels, Generation X. He also trained and still works as a visual artist, and has several non-fiction books as well, usually incorporating photography. He became a writer completely by fluke, he says, though now “there’s nothing else I’d rather do”.
This is extracted from a piece called “Living Big” in the Financial Times Magazine. (The emphasis in the quotation is mine, not Coupland’s.) It’s very interesting, starting off with a series of anecdotes that seem only partially connected, and then concluding with an argument that makes what preceded into a sensible whole — not your standard high school five-paragraph expository essay. Hurray!
I’ll regret this later in the day, but only with a bleary, weary grin and a bemused shake of the skull. I get a little hoops-deprived here in China, but not in these wee hours. It’s ten to five in the morning, and my adopted hometown team has just done the ridiculous.
To update last week’s Jordan Conn article on Grantland: “If a team wins TEN out of 12 national championships in Canada, does it make any noise? Meet the Carleton University Ravens.” Well, the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees (just Google it) did, and fought madly and well, but the dynasty stands as the Ravens rolled on, 79-67. Did it make any noise? Well, just north of 7000 fans in the home of the NHL’s Ottawa Senators – yup, for all you Murricans reading, our national college hoops classic drew over 10,000 empty seats with the two local unis in it – made a fine effort. Sometimes the play-by-play guys were synchronized with the three cameras operating, and for a second-tier pro and a one-weekend-a-year ex-coach colour guy, the SportsNet 360 team did a fine job.
It’s an early Friday evening, down-home time. If I was in Ottawa, I’d have spent hours by now in a cavernous puck pagoda – named for reasons corporate after Canada’s iconic purveyor of duct tape, snow shovels, lawn mowers and power saws – and I and a few thousand echoing others would know two of the four teams in the only-slightly-mad northern university basketball version of the Final Four. It’s the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball tournament, and you can’t get there from here in Dalian, China.
The expected collision in the Canadian final: Carleton Ravens collide, in the big house, with their crosstown rivals from OttawaU.
The March Madness of the American tournament – featuring 64 teams (once the play-in games are out of the way) to our eight finalists – is yet to come, and I’m only slightly crazed by the distance I feel. Detachment doesn’t come easy, but it comes, friends, it comes, often whether we want it or not. When I’m in Canada, I’m an Ottawa man, have been since 2002. I’m a long-time nutter of a basketball coach, and I knew Carleton University’s Amazing Dave before he was the least-known ruler of Canadian sport, the guy whose teams at a previously mediocre Ottawa school have won nine national championships in the last eleven years. It’s a dynasty such as we don’t see in sports anymore, and even most maple leafs don’t know about him or the furiously good teams he produces, year after decade. The most shocking upset, possibly, of this year’s CIS Final 8 happened before the tourney began, when the neighbouring University of Ottawa Gee-Gees were given the number one seed after a late comeback storm and a buzzer-beater in the (almost meaningless) Ontario final gave them a one-point win over Carleton’s Ravens, their first domestic loss in nearly two years.
I’ve been studying and writing about this book off and on for months, and today I’ve finished. My first look at The Unconscious Civilization (and its author, John Ralston Saul) was here, and the summaries of the first four chapters are also linkable (and brief):
II “From Propaganda to Language”
A practical humanist.
III “From Corporatism to Democracy”
IV “From Managers and Speculators to Growth”
The final instalment of the 1995 Massey Lectures series by the notable Canadian writer/activist John Ralston Saul was titled “From Ideology to Equilibrium”. All were published in book form later that same year, and it’s a measure of the enduring value and bold vision of the book that a tenth-anniversary reissue came; I wouldn’t be surprised to see another edition come out next year for the 20th. (His 2004 The Collapse of Globalism came out again in ’09, with some extra commentary in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis that he had predicted.) In this lecture/chapter, Saul advances and finally summarizes his argument; these thoughts also point towards his later book, On Equilibrium. He doesn’t believe in air-tight utopian dreams, but in the same way that Socrates advocated a lively but humble journey “towards knowledge without the expectation of finding [absolute] truth”, Saul describes his philosophy on genuine societal progress this way: “Practical humanism is the voyage towards equilibrium without the expectation of actually arriving there.”
I’m no historian, and my knowledge of economics is even thinner, but I never liked Adam Smith. This was due mainly to my ignorance, as well as the company he keeps. Right-wingers and trickle-down theorists invoke him as if he was a bearded Old Testament patriarch, and as a younger man I assumed that their often-heartless, always plutocrat*-friendly policies made St. Adam someone to reflexively dislike and ignore. I still haven’t actually read much of Smith himself, but Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization points out, several times, the ways in which Adam Smith’s thinking has been cited selectively and often incorrectly by modern “voodoo economists”. Here’s one excerpt:
* noun (derogatory) 1. a person whose power derives from their wealth. (syn. : rich person, magnate, millionaire, billionaire, multimillionaire)
“This idea that sympathy for others is the essential characteristic of the human condition was…central to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, a treatise that is rarely mentioned by the false disciples of his economic theories. They limit themselves to a narrow reading of The Wealth of Nations and then apply it to the general…society….How poor Adam Smith got stuck with disciples like the market economists and the neo-conservatives is hard to imagine. He is in profound disagreement with their view of society.”
John Ralston Saul (1947- ) in the closing chapter of The Unconscious Civilization, a 1995 book that echoes his delivery that same year of Canada’s remarkable annual Massey Lecture series. The talks and the subsequent book are a good capsule of Saul’s views on individualism, corporatism, and the building of a humane and progressive society. I’ll soon be posting my final look at this excellent and admirably brief publication, the end of a series of posts that began here.